http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
"FAIR" IS ONE of those nice words that make us feel good -- no matter how
much damage or dangers it leads to. The concept has sunk in so deeply that
nothing causes such indignation as the charge that some person, policy or
institution has been "unfair."

Yet when I hear educational policies discussed in terms of fairness, my
reaction is: Thank G-d my teachers were unfair to me when I was growing up
in Harlem back in the 1940s!

My seventh-grade English teacher, for example, used to require everyone who
misspelled a word to write that word 50 times as part of his homework and
bring it in the next morning. Misspell three or four words, on top of the
rest of your homework, and you had quite an evening ahead of you.

Was this fair? Of course not. Kids on Park Avenue probably heard those
words at home far more often than I did. The magazines and books in their
homes probably contained many of those words, while my family couldn't
afford to subscribe to magazines or buy books.

Fairness was never an option. The only choice was between the temporary
unfairness of forcing us to learn things that were a little harder for us to
learn and the permanent unfairness of sending us out into the world
unprepared and doomed to failure.

Many years later, I happened to run into one of the guys from that school
on a street in San Francisco. He was now a psychiatrist and owned a home and
property in Napa Valley. If he wanted to live on Park Avenue, I am sure he
could afford it now.

As we reminisced about old times and caught up on the things that had
happened to us since then, he mentioned that his various secretaries over
the years had commented on the fact that he seldom misspelled a word.

"Mine too," I said. "But, if they knew Miss Simon, there would be no
mystery as to why we don't misspell words!"

Although I never finished high school and struggled to make ends meet for a
few years before going to college, when I took the Scholastic Aptitude Test
I scored higher on the verbal portion than the average Harvard student. That
was probably why Harvard admitted me. No doubt much of that was due to Miss
Simon and other teachers like her who were "unfair" to me.

What if they had been fair to me and my schoolmate? Where would we be
today? Maybe in some halfway house -- if we were lucky.

Some people say that my philosophy is "tough." But it is life that is
tough. My ideas are a piece of cake compared to life.

What about the other kids who went to school in Harlem in the 1940s? Their
test scores were very similar to those of white kids in similar
neighborhoods, sometimes a shade ahead and sometimes a shade behind, but
always in the ballpark -- unlike today.

Education is just one of the areas in which the mushy notion of fairness
makes those who believe in it feel good about themselves -- at the expense
of other people's lives.

We are so used to hearing about policemen warning criminals about their
right to remain silent that some of the younger generation may not realize
that this is something that never existed during three-quarters of the
history of the United States.

Back in the 1960s, both the Attorney General of the United States and the
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court thought it was unfair that inexperienced
and amateurish criminals would make damaging admissions that more savvy
crooks and members of crime syndicates would never make. Therefore cops were
required to warn everybody, so as to bring the dumbest crook up to the level
of the most state-of-the-art mafioso.

There was no thought of the cost of creating this fairness between
different categories of criminals. No one asked: How many women are you
prepared to see raped, how many neighborhoods terrorized, how many people
killed, for the same of this conception of fairness?

A police chief who tried to caution a conference of judges in 1965 about
the consequences of such decisions was literally laughed at -- by two
Supreme Court justices, among others. How many victims or their widows or
orphans would have laughed is another story.

Someone always has to pay the price of fairness, whether in money or in
other ways. There are many examples in my recently published book, "The Quest for Cosmic Justice."

This straining for an abstract and impossible
kind of fairness and justice is one of the most tragic quests of our
time.